FAQ

FAQ

#List of FAQ

• Why does my column only sort once?

#Why does my column only sort once?

There are various reasons why this could happen, but the most often it is due to an incorrect parser being set.

When a table has tablesorter applied to it, it must determine what type of data each column contains. The code that does this isn't really that smart, because all it does is looks at the first cell in that column - it is smart enough to skip empty cells and go to the next row - and then runs through each parser until something matches.

So say you have text included after a date, something like "Aug 21, 2009 12:21 PM blah", the date parser won't think this is a date because of the extra text. So it will set the parser as just plain text. See this demo. To fix this, wrap the date text in a span

<td><span>Aug 21, 2009 12:21 PM</span> blah</td>

then target the date using the textExtraction option, like this (working demo)

textExtraction: {
    1: function (node) {
        return $(node).find('span').text();
    }
}

Alternatively you can wrap the extra text in a span

<td>Aug 21, 2009 12:21 PM <span>blah</span></td>

Then modify the text extraction function like this (demo):

textExtraction: {
    1: function (node) {
        return node.childNodes[0].nodeType === 3 ? node.childNodes[0].nodeValue : $(node).text();
    }
}

Or, write your own custom parser (demo):

$.tablesorter.addParser({
    id: "dates",
    is: function (s) { return false; }, // don't auto detect this parser
    format: function (s, table) {
        // match dates in this format: "Mmm dd, yyyy hh:mm:ss AM"
        var date = s.match(/^[A-Z]{3,10}\.?\s+\d{1,2},?\s+(?:\d{4})(?:\s+\d{1,2}:\d{2}(?::\d{2})?(?:\s+[AP]M)?)?/i)[0];
        return date ? $.tablesorter.formatFloat((new Date(date).getTime() || ''), table) || s : s;
    },
    type: "numeric"
});

$('table').tablesorter({
    headers : {
        1 : { sorter : 'dates' }
    }
});